Investigation of Influence of Membrane Type on Water Recovery by Pressurized Membrane Processes from Textile Washing Wastewaters

Abstract

Developments in industrial activities around the world lead to increase water consumption and to become widespread industrial water pollution problems. This situation accompanied by increasing water shortage issues needs to be realized technological applications which include recovering water in reusable quality from wastewaters of excessive water-consuming industries. In this study, recovering water in reusable quality from textile washing wastewaters having 6.22±0.03 pH, 1130±321 mg TDS/L, 2362±727 mg COD/L and 744±234 mg TOC/L was aimed using ultrafiltration (UF), nanofiltration (NF) and reverse osmosis (RO) membrane processes. In this respect, effect of membrane type as the main parameter for real-scale installations on reusable water quality was examined. Experiments were performed using four membranes each for UF and NF and five for RO at the conditions of original pH, 25 oC and 300 rpm cross-flow rate in trans-membrane pressures of 8, 12 and 40 bar for UF, NF and RO, respectively. At the experiments, the best performances were obtained by UH050, NF270 and LFC-3 membranes for the aforementioned order of the processes. This study was proved that reuse water with pH 6.34, 13 mg TDS/L, 34 mg COD/L and 14 mg TOC/L could be produced from textile washing wastewaters using UF/NF/RO combined system.